MEDITATION DRAFT: SESSION 2 THE BODY'S PENDULUM

November 21st, 2022

On Monday Tinkered Thinking releases a draft of a lesson from the forthcoming meditation app, currently called The Tinkered Mind (If you can think of a better name, please reach out. I'm not crazy about the current one, but I'll be damned if I let an imperfect name keep me from developing a good idea.) The rationale here is simply to stave off project stagnation by taking a wish to work with words on a daily basis (Tinkered Thinking Posts) and combine it with adjacent projects. This also gives regular readers a chance to get a preview of what I'm cooking up and to get feedback before the app launches, which is a tactic that has proved extremely useful with other projects unrelated to Tinkered Thinking. 

One further introductory note: The goal of this meditation app is predominantly aimed at helping individuals build a robust daily habit by breaking that habit down and tackling it's consitituent parts one at a time and aiding the process with a new and innovative way of tracking progress, the likes of which has not been seen in other meditation apps or habit tracking apps.

Again, if you have any feedback, please reach out via Twitter 

Session 2: The Body’s Pendulum

Take a comfortable seat. There’s no need to worry about a particular posture just yet. That will be covered soon in a future episode. For now, just try to be comfortable. For this session we are going to explore a couple breathing techniques, their different physiological effects, how such breathing methods aide a meditation practice and how they can also be leveraged to increase the likelihood that the habit sticks.

Once you’ve found some degree of comfort, take a deep and relatively quick breath through the nose, keeping the lips closed and the tongue gently resting against the roof of the mouth. Pull the air down into your core. Allow the ribcage to expand outward instead of lifting up toward your chin. Briefly hold the breath for a moment or two, and then slowlyyyy exhale. Try to make the exhale roughly twice as long as it took to inhale the breath.

A count can be helpful to get a feel for this. Inhale till 4, starting on

 1 - 2 - 3 - 4

then hold for a moment and exhale 

8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1. 

And let’s repeat, inhale till 4 starting on 

1 - 2 - 3 - 4

then hold for a moment and exhale 

8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1.

If it feels as though you can’t take a deep enough breath it might be because the lungs are already full. It’s common to have very shallow breathing caused primarily by never actually evacuating the filled lungs, like trying to fill a glass of water that is already full, so it can be helpful to pay extra attention to fully exhaling.

Inhale again till 4, starting on 

1 - 2 - 3 - 4

hold for a moment and then exhale  

8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 -1

Continue with breathing with this method of long exhales for a few more moments. The purpose of this specific rhythm for the breath with a long exhale is to simply help relax the body. By breathing in this way we engage the parasympathetic portion of the autonomic nervous system and create a small cascade of changes in our immediate biology. These deep breaths with long exhales slow the heart rate and in turn: we feel calm. This technique can also be used to help you get to sleep. And for those who struggle with a lot of anxiety it may take a little while to feel that sense of calm, but this method of breathing will eventually be particularly effective with anxiety.

All future guided sessions will begin and end with a few breaths using this deep exhale method.

The purpose of it at the beginning of these sessions is two fold - not only does it have a positive effect on our quality of attention and focus, but it also just feels good, and in order to help maximize the chances that we continue developing the habit we’re after - especially during these early days - it’s incredibly powerful to simply get into a state that feels good - it makes it more likely that we’ll return to it tomorrow, because we are drawn to positive states, especially those that can be reliably reproduced.

After four or five of such breaths, allow them to even out so that exhales are the same length as inhales. Ideally each inhale and each exhale should be 5.5 seconds long. This method of breathing has been referred to as Coherence Breathing and it is optimal for the body’s efficiency, placing the heart, lungs and circulatory system into a state of systemic coherence.  

Counting can again be helpful here. I’ll count out 2 sets of inhales and exhales.

Breath in on:

1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 

And breath out on:

5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1

Breath in:

1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5

Breath out:

5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1

Continue breathing like this for the next few minutes.

This slow, even and equal breathing method is what we will aim for during the bulk of each session.  So moving forward we will bookend each session with the deep exhale method, and we’ll fill the middle of the session with our equal length Coherence Breathing.

Now, in the long run, you’ll find what works best for you, but for the first month of our meditation program here, this structure for the breath for each session is designed to help you feel as refreshed and calm as possible by the time the session is over. And as mentioned before, part of the aim here is that you’ll naturally be incentivized to come back tomorrow to get more of this positive, feel-good state, created particularly by those long slow exhales. 

But of course it’s not just an incentive for tomorrow, it’s also the first thing we can do in the context of this practice that will immediately add to the quality of your whole day right now - and that is the entire reason why this meditation app exists - to try and help as many people as possible raise the quality of their life on a day to day basis. Taking time to slow down and make a meaningful impact on your own biology with a breathing practice is one of the fastest and most effective ways to make the rest of the day a little bit better. It’s a subtle tweak that has a profound effect.

Breathing practices are of course ancient, and in fact the word yoga originally had little to do with stretching muscles and in fact referred specifically to breath work. There’s recently been a resurgence of interest and research in breathing, and the routine just described is informed by a lot of that new research.

Eventually, as we move into exercises that engage the mind, the breath will take on another level of importance. The breath is like the body’s pendulum, it’s the one thing that we can’t stop doing, and because of this, it’s an excellent anchor for exploring the nature of our attention and focus. The breath will become a proxy for the present moment, and what I mean by that is often we don’t even realize we’re breathing, we do it unconsciously, and the same goes for the present moment. Often we’re lost in thought, daydreaming about the future or worrying about something that happened in the past, and we fail to notice what is going on right now. And if any of that sounds confusing or odd, don’t worry, we’ll get to it with increasing depth in future sessions. 

For now, as we come to the close of this session, begin the transition from equal, even breathing back to the long slow exhales. 

Breath in till 4 on 

1 - 2 - 3 - 4

And… Breath out

8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1

Breath in, and continue these slow exhales for a couple more breaths as the session comes to a close. 

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: ODDLY EVEN

November 20th, 2022

The barman placed the cold drinks down on the bar before Lucilius and Lucilius picked one up and handed it to his beautiful date. The two smiled and clinked glasses.

Lucilius announced: “Vashe Zdorov’ye!”

His date laughed. “Cheers!” She said raising her glass.

The cold liquor was hot and sweet, and Lucilius savored the taste as music drifted through the lobby. He breathed deeply, letting the good day wash over him, and as he looked around, his eye caught a rare sight. Off in a corner was a table for two with a built-in chessboard.

It was too perfect. Lucilius looked to his date. “Do you know how to play?” He asked, nodding at the chess table.

“Yes,” she said.

“Let’s play!” Lucilius said, standing up from the bar stool.

“No,” she said. Lucilius abruptly stopped.

“Why not?”

“When I was young my cousins taught me how to play, and then they won over and over and after enough defeats I stopped because it wasn’t fun and I swore to myself that I’d never play ever again.”

Lucilius sat back down, dejected. How unfortunate, he thought. And aggravating. It was a common problem. Lucilius had many friends who refused to play the game because they’d simply never made it through that brutal learning curve that comes with trying to pick up the game.

Lucilius looked around at the beautiful lobby, listening to the music, and back at his date. It was so perfect, and here was such a pleasant opportunity, ruined by some inconvenient little fact. He personally had no interest in winning. It was just fun to play - a nice way to spend a thoughtful and attentive time with someone else. Lucilius sighed, figuring he’d be better off if he just let go of the idea and try to enjoy the time regardless.

But then a different idea caught his mind.

“Wait a minute,” Lucilius said, standing and digging into his back pocket for his wallet.

“I’ve got an idea. Come with me.”

He walked to the chessboard and his date reluctantly followed, her expression growing soured.

“I told you I do not want to play,” she said.

“Let’s try a different version,” Lucilius said. “I just thought of it.”

He sat on one side of the chessboard and pulled a coin from his wallet. He smiled.

“Ok, this is what we do. We each make a move, and then we flip the coin. If it lands on heads we keep playing and we each make another move, and then flip the coin again. But if it lands on tails, we will switch sides!”

His date was skeptical but curious. She sat down and her eyes glanced over the pieces. She took a sip of her cocktail and set it down.

“Ok,” she said.

Lucilius pushed his King’s pawn out two spaces, and his date followed suit with her Queen’s pawn. Then Lucilius eased a thumb under the coin and flicked it up into the air. He caught it and slapped it onto the back of his other hand.

“Tails!”

The two stood up and swapped places.

“Well, it’s your turn again,” Lucilius said. His date smiled at the curious reversal and the two kept playing, flicking the coin up into the air every couple of moves and occasionally swapping sides.

When Lucilius finally made the mating move, the two were a little sad. Bittersweet that the game was over. And for a moment Lucilius figured his date was disappointed that her side had lost.

“I guess I didn’t really win,” Lucilius said, looking at his date. “And you didn’t really lose.”

There was a question in her expression as she glanced at the board again and back at Lucilius. He shrugged.

“We both contributed to both sides. I contributed to the losing side and you made moves for the winning side. We both sort of won.”

A smile lit up her face and the two lifted drinks and clinked to the game made bittersweet - not from defeat, but simply because it was now over.

BODY AS PUZZLE

November 19th, 2022

For many years I’ve been tinkering with just about every variable related to health that I can think of. For a variety of reasons, but for two in particular. One is the idea that subtle tweaks made with the right knowledge can have huge effects, and the second is simply that the body is a bit of a puzzle, and it’s fun to continually perform experiments and learn about it - it’s delightful to think that I’m a system that is experimenting on itself in order to try and understand it’s self as a system better.

Another aspect of this search and tinkering, which I’ve only recently realized is that I have a very high degree of interoception compared to most people. This is the ability to feel things that are going on inside your body. For example I can count my heartbeats without putting a couple fingers to my wrist or neck. I can simply feel my pulse, nearly body wide, and that signal is strong enough that I can count heartbeats while walking, I don’t even have to be sitting still in order to “hear” it. This high interoception has also been the reason for chronic discomfort. For the majority of my life I felt much like I was wearing a second skin - something uncomfortable, like a wet suit, and like many people, I struggled with getting lean, despite working out very consistently and being fairly mindful about my diet. This is despite the fact that my hunger has pretty much always been off the chart. I was the sort of person who could eat a whole large pizza and then seriously contemplate ordering a burger. The feeling of an appetite simply never went away it seemed.

Finally, I recently cracked the puzzle on this tangle of symptoms. After learning about research regarding fermented foods from the Andrew Hubberman podcast earlier this year, I started eating kimchi quite regularly, and there were a few improvements. But then I moved at the beginning of the summer and quite suddenly I became very learn, had a ton of energy, and frankly my body had never worked better. I thought it was the new variety of kimchi I was religiously eating. But then I moved again and the incredible shape and function of my body faded back to the old normal. I tried different kimchis lazily thinking that it was perhaps a specific sort of culture of bacteria in the kimchi I had been eating that was responsible.

After a few more months of cycling through different varieties of kimchi it was clear I wasn’t anywhere close to replicating the incredible shape I was in during those summer months.

So I started researching the predominate species of bacteria that were in kimchi. I knew one of the most important signals of what I experienced during the summer is that my ubiquitous hunger had radically changed. I was barely hungry and felt satisfied half way through meals. Suddenly questions that I should have been asking months earlier started topop up:

What is the mechanism of hunger? Is it just Ghrelin? Or is there more going on?

What turns off a sense of appetite?

Is there any research about strains of gut bacteria and how it relates to the mechanism of hunger and appetite?

This is where things get interesting: I learned about GLP-1 or Glucagon-like peptide-1. It’s produced by a specific type of endothelial cell and it’s biphasic, meaning simply that it turns on twice. GLP-1 is largely responsible for turning off hunger. This lead me to a fairly robust assumption: My GLP-1 levels must be horribly low because my hunger never turns off.

But It did during those couple summer months.

So is there a connection between gut bacteria and GLP-1

You bet. Some gut bacteria can absolutely demolish GLP-1 production, while others can increase it by 300X.

It was at this point in the feverish googling and reading that I remembered an important detail about that summer I’d totally forgotten about. I had taken a round of Bio+ K which is essentially a yogurt that purports to have something like 50-80 Billion live bacteria in each little container and I’d downed 6 within a 36 hour period.

So then I started cross-referencing the specific strains listed on that product with researched connections to GLP-1. Lo and behold I had flooded my system with some powerful GLP-1 agonists at the beginning of the summer. The new theory was that they had simply died off, and so my body went back to it’s former shape and function.

This little research session was about two weeks ago and since I’ve inundated my system with a number of rounds to repopulate my gut with these GLP-1 agonists, and lo and behold the effects I saw over the summer are beginning to return. My hunger is far more manageable, and I’m shedding weight again.

This has lead me to wonder. Perhaps the obesity epidemic is a crisis of gut bacteria?

But is there anything that could potentially bolster that idea, as in, what would cause such a huge disruption of gut bacteria across such a big population?

The answers may be fairly obvious. A round of antibiotics can seriously disrupt a person’s gut, and we pump livestock full of antibiotics. Could meat treated with antibiotics be killing off healthy bacterial colonies in people’s guts? It certainly seems plausible.

There’s also things like Glyphosate - weed killers and other insecticides and pesticides which percolate into the food we eat - all which is equally lethal to the sort of bacteria we have in our digestive system.

The proof may very well be in the pudding. Literally.

The issue of gut bacterial health might be a crisis of friendly fire. The practices we have adopted to kill off bad pathogens may very well be killing off all the good stuff we need.

It may also help explain the radical changes people often observe when they move to a different part of the world and see changes in their body - why the French can eat in ways that seem as though it would make them obese and yet they stay lean. Gut bacteria is bound to be different from place to place, especially if regulations regarding food additives, ie. Antibiotics, pesticides, etc.

This is all conjecture of course. But the ancedata of my personal story certainly points out the radical power of gut bacterial make up. Having replicated the results twice now, it’s hard not to be convinced that there’s a very easy and simple solution to a couple issues that I struggled enormously with. A subtle tweak with profound effects…

MINIMUM VIABILITY FRACTAL

November 18th, 2022

Minimum Viability is fractal. It applies to everything I can think of, but the best way of introducing it is through the lens of the tech industry. The most celebrated incarnation of this concept is the Minimum Viable Product. This is at the heart of tech start-ups that seek to move fast, ship early and iterate. This little equation: ship early, fast and iterate, is touted as an effective recipe for success. Pre-launch, the aim is to build the minimum viable product - the simplest version of an idea that can be delivered to potential customers to test for product-market fit. All this means is - is the idea good? Can it make money? Are there actual real people who appreciate this idea?Once those questions are answered, the minimum viable product is either abandoned for a new one based on a different idea, or it is improved upon, iterated in response to user feedback and, ideally, turned into a stronger product.

However, the Minimum Viable Product is an expression of a fractal process. Meaning simply: the minimum viable product is an event that is produced by a cascade of similar smaller events that have the same phenotype.

Let’s rewind the process of a Minimum Viable Product particularly as it applies to tech. Where does it start? A programmer, naturally. But let’s go back even further. Where does a person start when the aim is to become a programmer?

This’ll likely make the most sense to programmers who have already got through this process, but I’ll do my best to try and make it excessiblef to the non-programmer…

Think about it. How would you begin to learn the art of programming? Or how did you begin learning?

There are a select few who can simply research, read and study without actually doing, form a fully informative picture, and then begin. But these people are not the norm - they are outliers and inso being, they don’t apply to the minimum viability fractal.

Generally a person seeking to break into programming will do a few courses, perhaps a Javascript course, perhaps a Python course, maybe C++ course. Whatever, it doesn’t matter. What ends up happening though is that these courses prove to be fairly useless. Sure some functions and class structures have been learned, but always at the end of such courses the question arises: what do I actually.. DO with all this stuff?

This approach vector is.. well I believe the technical term is ass-backwards. It is putting the cart ahead of the horse. It’s learning how to make cadmium paint without realizing it’s the sky you should be painting. Or put another way:

The only real way to learn programming is to try and build something. Some application, some idea, some tool or toy. Something you can dream up. This vision becomes the north star of one’s learning compass, and the process becomes much simpler, albeit a bit more challenging. Instead of the comfort of pursuing a 30 lesson course with a definitive beginning, process and end, the task is now radically different. The question is refined to this: what is the minimum viable action I can take to bring this vision to life? Perhaps a familiarity with some of the coding languages is helpful, but this can be done with some googling and reading some high level descriptions. That’s actually the main skill of a programmer: Googling. Because as Chris Pines one said: Programming isn’t about what you know, it’s about what you can figure out. And I don’t believe Pines meant this in an exclusively high-level way. He didn’t mean: you figure out how to code and then you know how to code. What I believe he meant is, coding is the process of continually figuring it out.

At least this has been my experience. The way to build a product is the same as the way to learn how to code: simply concentrate on figuring out the next smallest viable step required to make your idea come to life. This creates efficiency in multiple ways. Instead of arming one’s self with a broad set of techniques and knowledge, the majority of which is useless for getting started, a novice with programming can start hopping the stepping stones of building a product by learning only what is necessary for those steps.

Each step in the process is it’s own version of the minimum viable product. Each step is a minimum viable action. A good programmer is a good learner, and a good learner figures out how to search broadly, quickly in order to narrow down a set of possible solutions and paths to explore. This is precisely how the actual process of a programmer’s workflow looks like. A problem arises, and that problem is converted into a question. That question is googled and the most promising results are opened up in new tabs on the browser. The programmer than quickly clicks through those tabs, scrolls and scans, assessing for answers that seem to address the specific problem at hand most closely.

There is so much useful stuff out there to learn, but all of it must be regarded as noise. Yes, perhaps one day it will prove useful, but it will become so because it’s the solution to the topic and problem at hand. But at any given moment the signal of learning is dictated by what is needed to proceed with building the product. At each stage in the game the builder is searching for the fastest and most efficient way to make the current goal a functional reality. It doesn’t matter if it’s perfect so long as it works. If one day it breaks, or causes problems, then that is the day that further investigation is needed. Deep dives are only required when the functional solution is actually that deep. Otherwise, good enough is the name of the game. If it works, then that’s good enough to move on to the next step.

When enough of these steps are taken, a minimum viable product eventually emerges, and it’s launched. It’s emergence is a kind of phase change that is highly noticeable - something that emerges from the process already described, but the event itself is no different from the events that lead to it’s creation. The minimum viable product is the product of minimum viable steps in a process that extends beyond launch. Iteration is just another word for the same event described previously. Learning is the experience of iterating on knowledge that does or does not already exist. Product iteration is taking small viable steps to improve what does or does not already exist. That later part - product iteration is taking small viable steps to improve what does not already exist is the process taken before a product is launched. The former proceeds after launch. But there is not difference, Minimum viability is always the guiding force that pushes and pulls the compass needle. Minimum viability is at the heart of every tiny action, be it while building a feature, debugging, or designing. But it also represents the entire project at every stage of iteration. Each iteration ideally represents the next smallest viable step for the evolution of that project.

Fractal viability is defined by minimizing the distance between each step in the process. This is the equation for product development, but it’s also the equation for learning. Product development and learning are both additive in the same exact way. Countless tiny realizations eventually lead to functional knowledge and eventually expertise, just as countless tiny developments of a product eventually lead to minimum viable product and eventually to a monopolistic domination of a market niche if the same process of small iterative developments is continued.

At each level of resolution the equation for progress is the same:

Take the next smallest step.

FOG OF FRUSTRATION

November 17th, 2022

What is frustration and what does it look like? What’s it’s aim and it’s source?

Frustration is an anger that is born when something doesn’t work. You get frustrated when you can’t get the computer to do something. So, is it that you’re frustrated at the co outer? Or is the frustration directed at one’s self? 

If this frustration is interpersonal, say, during a conversation, then there’s an additional problem. Even if the frustration is intended to be directed solely inward, at one’s self, the effect, or rather, the external appearance is one of anger. And in practice an angry person in conversation can easily be misconstrued as disrespecting, even rude, and such things  can appear to be directed at the other person.

So where is the root of frustration? It’s quite clear what’s going on when angry at someone else. But frustration is a bit more diffuse. Frustration can be directed, just like anger.. or at least it can feel like that. I’m frustrated with the computer, for example. But where does the error lie that causes the disappointed expectation. In the case of not getting something like a computer to work, the cause is the user - it’s the frustrated person who simply lacks the knowledge and know-how to achieve the desired effect.

Frustration is inevitably an anger regarding a lack of agency. It’s a snap recognition of an ability absence - the ability to do something particular is absent. 

Therefore, frustration occupies this strange Venn diagram in the world of emotions. It’s primary direction and source is inward, but externally it can be interpreted as an outward anger directed at some object or person. Frustration is a recognition of our current incompatibility with some detail of the world.

Similar to confusion, it is often a first step involved in learning. The real trick is to first realize that confusion, and even outright frustration can be turned into curiosity. It can be difficult. It can require a few slow breaths, but often it just requires: a good question about exactly what isn’t working.